A wide variety of user interfaces are used in computing systems to enable a user to move a cursor to a desired position in a list, in order to highlight a particular item for selection. Some lists, however, can be quite large, and may include hundreds, thousands or more items. Additionally, many lists regardless of size have a sequential arrangement of items that a user may wish to browse through sequentially. In some cases, the user will want to quickly pass through large numbers of items, for example to move to a location that is distant from the current cursor position. In other cases, it will be desirable to make fine and/or slow adjustments and only slightly move the cursor (e.g., sequentially browsing through a relatively small number of items once a general area has been reached, in order to select the particular item of interest).
Existing user interfaces are often very slow when called upon to cycle through many items in order to reach a distant item in a long list of items. This can lead to user impatience and dissatisfaction with the user interface. Alternatively, a different navigation operation can be performed, such as a navigating up to a higher-level category associated with the items (e.g., navigating up from a visual display of musical artists to a visual display of associated musical genres). The user could then move to select the appropriate category, and then navigate back “down” in order to reach a local area containing the desired item. However, this hierarchical approach entails different and extra steps, which may make the browsing and selection process more cumbersome. The hierarchical approach also prevents the user from directly paging through the individual items between the current and target location, which may in some instances be desirable to the user. The above challenges of providing effective navigation of items can be even more pronounced in a natural user interface environment, such as a computing setting without a keyboard or mouse, in which a host of issues can arise with respect to interpreting user gestures.